Last Day

It’s the fourth night in a row that I’ve woken up and not known where I was. In the darkness, I blink around the room, guessing. I know it can’t be home—that knowledge has become instinctive—so where am I now, exactly? Which city, which country, is this one? And then something gives the room away—the shape of the table, the light through the window—and so I remember. This is Buenos Aires, this is San Telmo, this is the hotel on Chacabuco where I checked in yesterday and the woman sat smoking in the kitchen, not getting up to hand me the keys. I was dreaming of rivers again.

At first, my dreams were of home, of the deep feet of snow in the woods and of the smell of my mother’s kitchen. I saw my father’s hands, heard my brother’s laugh, inhaled the scent of my lover’s skin. I remembered all that I’d left in the night, and in the morning I woke, the memory of home still heavy on my chest. Those dreams left an aching, an empty stillness, and I wept for how far everything felt.

After a few months, though, the dreams shifted and turned foreign. Now I was crossing a turquoise sea over fresh coral with strangers; now I was riding a train down, down towards the snow. Now I was entering an ancient city; now I was climbing a peak, where the air grew thin and my breaths came short and desperate. I stopped thinking, at nighttime, of home, and started dreaming instead of constant motion. Every possibility came in the night; the whole world arrived. I’d been thrown; no one knew me. This was freedom.

In these last dripping days, this room is all of the rooms that I've known. My dreams skitter away and I'm left only with the emotions they held and the vague outlines of places. Sometimes I am screaming, sometimes I am crying, often I laugh so hard I wake myself up. There are strangers in these nights, although I’ve heard that every face you’ve seen in your dreams is a face you’ve seen before—on the street, perhaps, years ago, when you looked and barely saw, never knowing you’d remember. There have been so many nights like this, so many shafts of unfamiliar light through curtain cracks, so many tables shaped the same. So many creaking beds, so many midnight trips for water. My dreams run together like songs, like a woven cloth of different colors, and when morning comes I wake again, unsure.

*

Buenos Aires is perfect now. Only in the afternoon does the air feel hot, heavy, slowing our footsteps down. The rest of the time, the jacaranas drop their purple blooms onto the street, the sycamores above us shade the sidewalks, and the wind filters into the train, cool and welcome. I sweat on the bus as it crosses the city, and I watch the sun go down from where I sit on the grass in the parks. Beautiful days, these are, each one longer than the next, each one just a tiny bit warmer. I let them run through me then leave me, because you can’t hold on to hours.

*

The last rented room has a door painted with peeling, mint-green paint. Morning glory winds up the banisters and there’s an outdoor pila, like the one Hilary had in Guatemala. (So long ago, that seems.) We can wash our dishes and clothes out here and hang them on the line that stretches over the patio so that our clothes flap against the crumbling cement of the building next door. There are shared bathrooms with drains in the floors and no shower curtains; there is a little kitchen with a two-burner stovetop and no fridge. There is a single bed in my room, a small table and two chairs. There is a cup and a plate and a bowl, a fork and a knife and a spoon. A glass, a bar of soap, a folded towel, an open window. It’s beautiful here, my last rented room. I close my eyes and breathe the wind; I think to myself, no one knows. No one could find me here, even if they tried; no one would know to look for me in room 49. The walls are painted two shades of pink, one old, one new, and I think of how free you are, when no one knows.

*

Nearly a year it’s been, and today the months are impossible to fathom. The flight tomorrow still doesn’t seem real, and I know it won’t be until I’m inside that metal craft, rising up into the sky and away from this place. How much I will leave behind: an invisible trail I’ve made, a knotted route down. How much I have seen; how many things I have learned. How many people I’ve met, how many words and kisses exchanged, how many good-bye tears. This good-bye, the one that comes tomorrow, I wonder how to bear.

For it isn’t what I leave, is it? It’s what I must take, and then where will everything fit? Will they stay with me, all those faces and conversations? All those touches exchanged? And what about the landscapes—the stretches of field and beach, the passes between mountains, the high-up towns where I knew no one? There is the way time passes, here in Argentina and everywhere else I've been—time can be molded, loosened, until it loses its shapes and curves to fit your life. There is the way people value their families above all else—above work, above money, family comes. There is the slow pace of walking, and there’s the way people talk to each other. Here, we all have stories, and everyone deserves to be heard. In these countries of immense poverty, of corruption and covered-up violence, I’ve never felt safer, I sometimes think. Never have I wanted for a place to sleep, a bite to eat, an ear to listen. 

There is the man on the bus while the rain pelts down; his clothes are patched, and he touches my hand and offers to help. There is the woman who wakes before the sun comes up to mop the floors of the place where I live, and even though she hasn’t slept much and there are bags under her eyes, she smiles at me while I wash my dishes. When I leave that place, she sits with me and my packed bags and talks with me over one last cup of coffee. There are the little kids who, on my last day at their school, bring out presents they made—a hat knit too tight, a purse with a broken strap. I can see them there in the yard as I take the bus home; it’s a schoolyard with broken glass and broken swings, and there they are, laughing. There is the girl I meet on the bus, the girl I meet when I most need a friend, the girl who stays with me two nights even though she’d planned on doing other things. After she’s gone, I found the bottle of wine and the piece of cake she’d left me. There are the two kind Americans who take me in as if their home is my own, who press money into my hand for a taxi when I say I’ll take the bus. They serve me dinner, they stay up late with me, and when I leave them, I’ll weep.

There is the boy who taught me that love can run smooth. He taught me that it doesn’t have to taste sharp on your tongue, and when he told me I didn’t have anything to fear, I knew in my bones it was true. He is the one who softened me, who spoke to me in patient Spanish, who took me on his bike to the orchard, to the water. He’s far from me now, but I still remember exactly the taste of his mouth, and I won’t give up hope that I’ll meet him again. He’s the one who knew all along that this journey was mine, mine alone, and after he showed me something beautiful, he let me go.

*

On my last day we visit the Chacarita cemetery. We wind through and out of Palermo and into the poorer barrio of Chacarita, whose main streets are lined with automotive shops, car dealerships, gas stations, and the massive, tree-lined central park. This cemetery is not for tourists; we’re the only ones who wander in with cameras to gaze at the streets and streets of tombs, of catacombs, of mausoleums and of graves. Except for the men who lean on brooms, squinting in the sun, and the women who walk, eyes straight ahead and lilies in their arms, we are alone. Alone, besides the ones who lie in darkness around us, uncountable souls in this massive place.

The sun pelts down; deeper into the cemetery we walk, until the pavement turns to cobblestones and pine needles litter the ground. Above us the sky is so blue. It doesn’t feel to me like the last day; it feels like a day, a day and nothing more, a day at the end of a long string of days. A place at the end of a long stretch of places; another graveyard, another blue sky, another old man leaning against his broom. Another old cat, who stretches in the sun and then looks at me once before turning and slinking away. Down she goes, between the rows of the mausoleums, and I follow. She’s gone into one, an old, cobwebbed tomb whose stained-glass windows were long ago smashed.

Do you live here? I ask her, and she blinks her green eyes, her pupils thin as crescent moons. She coils her body back, back into where the caskets lie, crooked and broken, looted many times over. I’m just another pair of feet walking past; I’m just another body. The cat disappears into the darkness; this tomb must be her home.

In the countries I’ve seen, death is not to be feared, not really. Everyone’s seen someone die too young; everyone knows their day will come. Everyone, mostly, especially the older ones, have seen war or known blood-freezing fear, or both things. For this, I think that they’re better at living for what matters most, and this is what I hope to take home. You can decide what the most important things are in your life, and those can come first. Your wife, your child, your bread, your bath; these can be what you prize, not money or phones or a car. As for the wind in the trees and the reflection of the clouds on the water—you can let those things surround you, if you want it badly enough. If you think hard about what you really want, you’ll find that it isn’t so much. You might even find that it’s everywhere, already.

And so I will go home richer than I’d ever imagined possible, for I have seen so much beauty, and I’ve known so much love. These places have filled my mind and spilled into my heart, and I pray they’ll continue to fall onto the page. I've learned so much about what makes life sweet and what makes it sacred, and so although I'm afraid, terrified even, to go back, I am mostly just awed, for how lucky I’ve been to have known all this.

Big cats

While I type away at my desk in my room, Pirucho sleeps on the floor. He's there so long I forget he's in the room, until I stand up and trip over him. He is a cat who constantly purrs and who loves to be held. When you pick him up, his front legs stick straight out like arms that don't bend. I love him so much. I can't even hold him today, because I'll hear him purr and it will make me cry. I leave this evening, and I hate goodbyes. It's not just him; it's this house, it's this life. I feel so sad today, so send some nice thoughts, okay?

Love, Kate

(he's mad at me here because he hates having his picture taken)

Take the city home

These days, I walk the streets in a nostalgic haze. Sometimes I am laughing, sometimes I am smiling, sometimes I am crying. Tomorrow I leave this apartment, this massive city, to take a bus through the night until I reach Cordoba, one of Argentina’s cultural gems. Part of me knows that I’ll get on that bus and it will make me feel alive, the wheels on the pavement in the night and the stars all around us as we cross the Pampas. Now, I love the rhythm of buses. I can ride them for hours or even days. I can sleep on them; I can read on them. No one bothers you here if you’re weeping, or eating, or drinking wine alone. They just let you be, stare out their window until the bus rolls into the city you’re trying to reach. The ayudantes help me with my backpack and call me mi amor. The country slides past.

Still, by now I should be used to saying goodbye, but it hasn’t gotten easier. I reached this place and I didn’t know if I would love it, but here I am, sunk. It’s just like the guidebooks say—Buenos Aires will seduce you. The city makes my dreams run rich and my blood warmer. It has made me quick on my feet and quick with the language, fearless on city buses that tear around corners and into neighborhoods I don’t yet know. The drivers cry out my street when we reach it, making eye contact with me in the rearview. Gracias! I shout, and leap out. I can jump off a bus now when it’s still moving.

And so now that I’m in love, it’s time to go. I didn’t think it would come this soon, the final day, but it’s always like this—the time you have left creeps up on you until, all of a sudden, you find you can count the hours. Only now it’s worse, because after I leave this country, I’ll go home, home to a place I’m afraid will make me numb. Little offices, little desks. Commutes, money, money, things. Will it fall from me—the ability to live with so little? The ability to walk slowly, to taste fully, to listen with both ears? The ability to see beauty in a crumbling wall? In broken glass? We want so much in that nation of ours; we need so much, and because we’ll never get all we need, we don’t stop wanting. We’ve got these awful gadgets, and we tell ourselves they bring us closer to other people, but they really just force us farther apart. We legitimize interruptions, hasty choices, jam-packed days and too-short nights. Take me with you, this city says, and I begin touching things—the trunks of trees, the curved wrought-iron bar over a window, the rusted metal on a dented car. The warm wood of tall, glossy shutters. It’s as if touching this place will imprint it onto my skin, so that when I leave, the city comes too.

Do you think about what you’ll do when you go home? A friend asked. Do you have dreams about it?  And I had to admit that while of course I think about the months ahead, I dream only about the past. Behind closed lids, my dreams come to me like paintings: the crest of a rounded hill in the Peruvian sierra, or an endless stretch of Bolivian salt. Thick jungle in Ecuador, cobblestones in Nicaragua, the smell of coffee on Antigua’s streets. A border crossing, dense with night, and an endless red dirt road.

Or they arrive in scenes, snippets from a film. I dream about birds flying in through an open window and pecking at crumbs on the floor. I dream about schools on hills, markets where water flows in the street, bakeries crammed with people. There are men who wear kids backpacks and kids who can count money better than I can. There’s Guatemala on Christmas, Ecuador on Easter, Nicaragua on Valentines Day, when the sun rose early and hot. I dream about my teachers and my students, and about men who sell orange juice on the corner. Carlos’ dark eyes, Katie’s easy laugh, and the way Raphael pulled me to him. I dream of Buenos Aires: the concerts in the streets, the crowded parks on weekends, the brown and silty river. The dreams come every night, five or six of them, and when I wake I can remember each one.

So the places are with me in my dreams, for now, and in the meantime, this is how I will say goodbye: I will walk up and down the streets, beneath the summer leaves, and I will smell and hear and feel everything. I will teach my last Spanish class, I will mail my last postcard, I will drink my final glass of wine and eat my final supper. I will kiss my friends good-bye—artisan Felipe and Leo the electrician, Donigan the writer and the beautiful diplomat Holly. I will give Alex and Vicky both hugs, and I will try to hide my tears from Pirucho. I will leave, just like always, and my heart will feel full and empty both.

*

I bring my laundry to the Laundromat today. It’s the place around the corner, the one that’s shaded by leafy trees and always locked, so you have to push the bell to be let in. It’s the one where the nice man works, the handsome man with kind eyes and worn hands. He has a young son who comes in the afternoons to help fold.

Today, the man fills out the receipt without asking my name. You remembered? I ask him, though I’ve told him only once. How could I forget, he replies, and hands me my receipt. Katy, it says. My Spanish name. He’s a beautiful man, a man who smells of detergent, and today he remembered my name. Don’t let this go, a voice tells me as I step outside, into the sun and the wind that smells so sweet. Nothing matters more than this moment, it says, and right now you have everything you want.

Palermo Home

To Donigan and Holly

How sad it was to leave you today, to leave your home and your white cat and those long, wide windows that look out onto the street. How I wept after Holly stood in the doorway to my bedroom, one hand on the doorjam, and told me she’d miss me. Don’t leave, she’d said, her smile tired and thin because of her cold. Do you know how long it’s been, since someone asked me to stay? How long, too, since someone’s sat on my bed and watched me pack my things, since they’ve put food in a bag for me - chocolate, empanadas, all the things that I love. For the road, Holly said to me, adding crackers to the bag. This is the way my mother packed food every time I’d leave the house to drive back to Wellesley, then back to Cambridge. It’s the way she brushed tears from her eyes as she handed me the bag that last time, when I hugged my family and then drove my car to my grandmother’s house in Connecticut, where it’s sitting now, waiting for me to come home.

God, this year’s awful goodbyes. If I’d known how many there would be before I left, I don’t think I could have borne it. It isn’t just the hillsides, the little towns, the cities where I lost myself and fell in love. I’ve said good-bye to the countries that showed me Spanish, and endless, winding markets, and what real suffering means. I’ve said good-bye to people who taught me how best to climb this region’s many mountains, and where to find the nicest fruit, the biggest, cheapest cut of meat, the coldest beer. I’ve said good-bye to little schools on crumbling blocks, and to the rambling brick building where, for three months, I taught English to those Ecuadorian kids. I cried and kissed my parents when they put me on that bus to San Jose; I said good-bye to Kendra, to Hilary, to Carlos and to Pamela, to Gaby. I said good-bye to Raphael and wondered when I’d see him next; I kissed Eloesa’s mouth and walked away. I have turned my back on so many places, so many people and so many homes. Little rooms, little stoves, and tiny mats where I was told, so many times, to leave my shoes.

Today I struggled to close my pack as Donigan looked on. It gets bigger every time I leave a place, I told him, and he started to rummage for another bag I could borrow for the shoes and books I couldn’t fit. It’s just for while you cross town, he said. I left today because I thought it best to give you your space; I didn’t feel right about living without paying, tripping over your life with Holly, but I didn’t think that leaving would make me this sad. I just didn’t think it would feel like family this soon. I waited so long to come to you, and when I finally got here, you opened your lives to me. You gave me this bed with the smooth yellow sheets; you gave me hot water, hot food. Never once did you say a cross word, a cruel thing, and always you told me how much you respect me. You praised my writing so much that I turned red and begged to change the subject, and you never once asked for me to pay. And so I know it was time to leave, time to work, time to push myself a little farther past the white, quiet walls of your apartment, but I hope you both know that I will always be grateful for the way you told me, as I walked out the door, that I could always come home.  I’ll never forget you, do you know that?

And so now here I am, in this living room just south of San Telmo. The second floor looks over a busy street that’s lined with bank machines and green-grocers and tiny delis jammed with cheese and wine. The window of my rented room watches the overgrown courtyard below, and that window has tiny cracks that let the wind in, so Alex and Vicky, the two women who live here, show me how to use the heater in the night. They microwave an empanada for me, and ask me whether I can figure out the MP3 player they bought just yesterday. Hijo de puta, Vicky swears; she is too old, she tells me, to learn to use such stupid things. She fiddles with it still while Alex washes the dishes from lunch and then hauls their big black cat onto her lap. 
How old is he? I ask Alex. 
How old is Pirouchi? Alex asks Vicky. 
Stop screaming! Vicky replies. He’s seven. Alex snorts. He’s five, she assures me, and Vicky, from where she sits with the tiny MP3 player in her hands, murmurs Six. Alex nods. 
He’s six, she confirms, and then kisses Pirouchi on his furry black head.

So far from Palermo, I feel. Here the buildings are closer, the people poorer, the grocery stores cheaper and dirtier and crowded. Here, Vicky and Alex talk over each other, finishing each other’s sentences and explaining to me what you can buy at the tienda across the street. Puta madre, they shout at the television, as the male politicians of the world parade past. And I wonder how Holly is feeling now. Are the antibiotics beginning to work? Have you started the movies I left there? And is Sophie sleeping on Donigan’s lap; is he holding his magazine over her? This is your home here, Donigan had said, and so I will practice my Spanish with Alex and Vicky, and after I do that, I’ll come home.

Another Country's Windows

I haven’t been this cold in months, I think. I wait for the 4 AM bus to leave Tupiza for Villazon, the border town where I’ll get my passport stamped and then enter Argentina. I’m freezing, I hear the girl in front of me whisper to her boyfriend. They are English, I can tell from their accents, and I envy them for the way they curl up together in their seats, sharing a blanket. I pull my jacket closer around me and wish for my hat, my second jacket, a cup of hot tea. Finally, half an hour late, we pull out of the station, southbound. The driver flicks the interior lights on in the inky blackness and blasts the radio, shouting to his ayudante as he goes. I close my eyes and try to sleep, hating him.

Villazon remains the cold, gray town Paul described. The buildings, set evenly along the icy, silent, early-morning streets, loom around me, the dark windows blank eyes that watch me shiver past. The sidewalks are broken by spindly, leafless trees, and the gray sky hangs low. An Australian girl emerged, teeth chattering, from the Tupiza bus, and so we walk together without speaking towards Argentina, sucking on caramels I bought from the bathroom guard with my last three Bolivianos. The border is marked by a long bridge and a sign that reads, in antique white lettering, Bolivia. When I turn and look back, I see that the other side reads Argentina. Just like that, we’re in. I take one last look at Bolivia, and then I am weeping in the cold. 

Good-bye, I am thinking, to the country with stretching deserts and bare hills, women with wheels of cheese in the streets, and those colors of the satchels and clothing. The long braids woven with yarn, the jolting roads, the clusters of mud huts and the spindly smoke of fires fruit-scented roadside fires. The alpaca, the freezing showers, the broken sidewalks. The way I felt, traveling through, like some kind of vagabond in the same three-day clothes, the only gringa in the lurching bus. The freedom of that, the sweet alone-ness. Already, people who look like me, with big packs and light skin, stand around outside the customs office, and I know with a dull and sudden ache that something's over. It's not just Bolivia; it's the last eight months of these places that exist so poor and wealthy both. It's a way of life I made, a way of navigating, and now, as I step over the line that divides that time from this, I feel a little something deep inside me tear. It's over, I am thinking, even though there's still so far to go. Something's lost, I know. I didn't expect this sharp and funny grief, but now I wonder how I didn't see it coming, for with each step forward I move closer and closer back: glass-paned stores, smooth paved roads, new clothes, rich food and the wanting. The taking things for granted, and the ease. Are you okay? The Australian girl asks, and I nod. It’s just the cold, I tell her, and brush the tears away.

*

It’s a spectacular ride from the border south, different enough to make me wonder whether the line on the map that divides the two countries is a real geographical divide. I lean back in my seat beside the Australian girl and admire the clean bus, the soft seats, the view from the second level of this double decker. The road feels so smooth beneath us, and the scenery—golden fields, distant mountains, the rainbow colors of the rocks and the blue sky of morning—keeps us silent, looking out. I could get used to this, I say, and then the bus shudders to a stop. I imagine a rest stop, even though we’ve only driven two hours, and then the driver comes down the aisle. He says something I can’t understand, something in the Argentinian accent that crushes the words, merges them together, creating a smooth and unrecognizable sound. He rounds up a couple of guys, and the next thing I know I feel them pushing the bus so that we roll forward, the engine off. Eventually, the bus rumbles to life, the guys come back on, flushed and laughing, and off we go. So much for the nice buses, the Australian girl says, grinning. We remember aloud the rickety buses that took us through Bolivia, the ones with the rattling windows and open grates, and marvel at the way those got us to where we needed to go without ever failing us.

*

I spend my first Argentinean night in Jujuy, a warm, valley city that Paul admired. I stroll up and down its sun-baked streets lined with tall, elegant doorways, the soft colors of the paint on the aging colonial walls, and the cafes that stay open all day and most of the night, serving real coffee with milk. I eat and eat of the spinach quiche that the woman sells in the deli beside my hostel, and I spent long minutes before her shelves of wine, eventually selecting a bottle that costs just three dollars and tastes, when I share it later with the old woman who runs my hostel, like liquid heaven and smells like pine and apples. In the night, the air is soft, and I sleep fully and long; it’s warm enough for just a sheet. The shower in the morning is hot, steaming up the white-tiled bathroom as the sunshine floods in. Que rico, I think as the water pours over me, and I don’t feel sad to be in Argentina, after all. Donigan was right; it does take just a day to forget how sweet a hot shower, or a slice of hot quiche, or a glass of white wine can taste. I feel guilty for how quickly I adjust.

On the ride to Salta the next day, I discover that I’ve learned to sleep, finally, on buses, and I close my eyes to the warm afternoon light and the baking fields of corn and grazing horses. I’m so sleepy, in fact, that when the driver wakes me up to see my ticket, I hand him a baggage slip from a bus ride to Sucre instead, then frown when he kindly shakes his head and passes it back.

In Salta, I find a hostel at the end of a whitewashed block south of the center, which is painted inside and out with every imaginable color. A gray cat lives here, a cat who sleeps on my bed by night and races up and down the stairs, over the connecting roofs, by day. The owners, a twenty-something couple with baggy pants and loose, curly hair, pour me a glass of wine on the first night and then sing together while a guest from Cordoba strums his guitar. I find, too, a market like the ones I found in Bolivia and every other place, a market with tiled counters where ladies serve up soup and plates of egg and pork and salad, juices of banana and orange and carrot. I see the manta of the indigenous everywhere, and the same braids woven with yarn. I am not so far, I discover, from the countries where I found something special and fell in love. Here, too, I can sit on the curb and drink soup from a bag, and I can wear the same clothes for three days in a row, as the Argentinian owner of my hostel does. I have not lost the freedom, I discover, that I felt in those freezing, high-up countries. It's the Latin, after all, that I've been living, and it just tastes different here. On these shadowed streets it's smoother, now painted with long Spanish windows, the shades halfway drawn to mute the sun. 

Tupiza

 I follow Paul to Tupiza, taking a bumpy, jolting ride from Potosi, where I’m placed in the back of the bus, the second-to-last seat, beside a woman who shares my cornmeal rolls and asks me about New York. I pretend, to make it easier, that I’m from the city. Every time we hit a speedbump, a rock, a break in the road, the bus lurches, we jump and fall in our seats, and the baby behind me screams. Hush, the woman holding him says. Hush, and she bumps him on her knee, feeding him pieces of cut-up banana. We drive on this unpaved road, where a few yards away there’s a paved version that matches our curves and bends. I wonder about this, a few times I let myself get angry, but I tell myself it’s not Bolivia’s fault. I never do find out why they’ve built two roads, one paved, one not, and we must take the latter.

I find, in Tupiza, a hostel with three narrow stories and a white roofdeck that reminds me of Antigua. I find two tall British boys who stay up with me until two in the morning, drinking wine and watching Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. They claim it’s a coincidence that this movie is playing, while we sit in the very town where those two outlaws met their makers. I argue that the movie plays every night, every other night, at least, but they are determined to believe it’s good fortune. They know most of the lines, reciting them just before Paul and Robert speak them, and then cackle when they hear them repeated.

I find jagged red hills that ring the town and stretch out to the north and south, glowing pink in the morning and violet as the sun sets. I find the Devil’s Door, two narrow, enormous slabs of brick-colored rock that stand two hundred feet high, flanked on either side by red dust and the tallest cacti I’ve seen since northern Peru. I find a stretching blue sky, speckled brown hills, a landscape so like my country's southwest. I find clean wind and dogs who live together at the end of an empty road in a ramshackle house. They’re dogs who bark and bark as I walk past, frightening me so that I pick up stones in case I might need to hurl them, but in the end those dogs are harmless, they just bark and then skulk away, back towards the half-finished group of adobe houses, the yard of old tires, of dried-up trees.

I find a town in the midst of its country’s Independence Day celebration; the parades last from Friday to early Sunday morning, and the music pumps. The ladies in the streets sell chocolate covered donuts, puffy soaked corn, glasses of chicha and paper cups of papas fritas, while an old man spins a manual merry-go-round while he sips his glass of beer and the little children perched on the tiny horses scream and demand more. That night, I say good-bye to the English guys, who are taking the night train to Uyuni, and then I crawl into bed and sleep to the sound of the Independence Day music. When my alarm sounds at 3 AM, just in time for the bus that will bring me to Bolivia’s border, I hear the music once more, pumping from the speakers set up in front of the train station. I step out onto the street, hoping that the drunk man screaming, shirtless on the corner, doesn’t notice as I walk with my pack beneath the bowl of twinkling stars. In the inky night, this town is just as busy as it was in the day. The streets are spilling over with people walking home, drunk off the celebrations of their nation’s independence.

Photitos

Behold, the niños of San Roque. Today was my last day for a couple of my classes, and to commemorate the occasion we took an abundance of photos. In addition, I was gifted many lovely things: a hand-knit hat, a hand-knit purse, a pen with a spiky green duck at the end, a bag of Ruffles, a container of some candy that comes in a little cup. Would Ivan Illich hate me for what I've done? Maybe so.

In any case, it is what it is. Good bye, San Roque! Thank you for a humbling and lovely time of it. 

Conversation from last night:

Eloesa: I want to see a picture of you with the kids! You'll look so tall and white!

Kate: Shut up.

Because it's true! That is just how I look. In real life the kids really aren't this tiny, it's just that Giant Kate is throwing off all proportions.

New Continent!

Up sick all night last night, but at least I had my mother there. One tearful goodbye in the JW Marriott parking lot, six hours in the bus to the airport, four more waiting in San Jose, one quiet flight, one flight with a group of school children and some Haitian refugees, one peaceful ride from the airport to this room. Two cans of Coca Cola, one-half a mini bagel, one handful of raisins. I am alive. I am in Quito now.

Saying Good-Bye to Guatemala

Good-bye to the place that taught me my first words of Spanish. Good-bye to the music on those buses, the cramped seats, the teetery routes, because two days in El Salvador have taught me that no bus is quite like a Guatemalan one. Good-bye to those microbuses and to the little children that quietly get sick in bags as the roads wind and dip. Good-bye to those mountain ranges, those blue peaks that stretch all the way to Mexico, and good-bye to the black Monterrico beach, the one that's littered with trash but beautiful nevertheless. Good-bye to the volcanic rocks scattered everywhere, the climate that grows colder and colder the higher you get, and good-bye to the eucalyptus trees, the alpine palm trees, the sapodillas, the ceibas, the cedars, the acacias. Good-bye to the flowers. Good-bye to those 62 stoves we built in Uspantan, those Mayan ladies in their traje, Hilary's apartment with its deep blue pila and good-bye to her sweet cat, Suerte. Good-bye to the lake, the deep Lake Atitlan with her ring of volcanoes around her. Good-bye to her waves, and the room that we had, that high-up room with the view of the fireworks on New Years, the fireworks that went off like brilliant dots, now in San Pedro, now in San Marcos. Good-bye to the orchids that hung in the bathroom; good-bye to that wide, white bed; good-bye to the sickness, the recovery, the market in Chichicastenango, that journey with you. Good-bye to the love that Guatemala gave, the love that I found, in so many corners, so many forests, so many different rooms. Good-bye to the hugs, the patience with my Spanish, the kisses on the cheek, the gifts of food, the gifts of juice, Norma's house in Xela, the dark, quiet streets at night, the dogs that come out when it gets dark. Good-bye, good-bye, and thank you for everything. I love you, Guate.